I took a health and fitness class last term, and I know for a fact that the problem is most definitely not people eating too much. The main problem is people not getting enough exercise every day, and to a lesser extent, not eating healthy. Because even if you don't eat healthy, you can still maintain some degree of a healthy body by being active. Look at Brian Phelps. Sure, he's an extreme, but it is probably easier to visualize extemes than middles. He eats like a four person family, but he's in incredible shape. And it's all because he exercizes every day. That is america's problem: we are getting too lazy. Sure, you could nip the problem before it happens by not eating food, but that makes your body stave, and if you don't exercise, you're not fit, and that can still lead to loads of diseases later on in life.
There's this whole diet fad that is going on and will go on forever. None of them work, because each one makes you either change your lifestyle dramatically, or rely on some sort of medication that you have to spend chunks of your savings to get. And when the diet runs dry, guess what, people gain back their weight. It's a simple fact that the slower you lose weight, the longer it will stay off because you don't change your lifestyle severely to lose little bits of weight at a time. The simplest method to do this is exercise about a half an hour a day. But people don't like this. People don't want to exercise every day because it takes work to get up every day and run, or bike, or play on that wii fit gathering dust underneath the tv a month after you buy it. The simple fact is, people are lazy to do anything fitness related. They can make multiple excuses like, I don't have the time, or I don't want to spend money on a gym. Sometimes these excuses are valid, but most of the time people are just making excuses to make excuses.
I run five miles five days a week. In order to get to the fat stored away in my body, I have to do continuous exercise for at least thirty minutes. I've never timed myself, but generally I reach thirty minutes at around two and a half miles. That means that two and a half miles of my run are fueled by fat. Since a mile is about 100 calories, I'm burning 250 calories of fat per run. Since a pound of fat is almost 2000 calories(I forgot the exact amount), I'm only burning a half to three quarters of a pound per week. That's pretty slow, although it would seem a lot slower if I had more fat on my body in the first place. To an obese person, it may as well be easier to just buy the pill. I've been doing this for the past two months, and I'm starting to get a little bored with it. That's why I'm changing up my routine a little. I'm going to start riding my bike up the hill every day. When that gets boring, I'll move onto something else. It's a good idea to switch things up a bit. Your body gets used to a certain workout after about 6-8 times. Bodybuilders know this, it's called plateauing. It also just gets plain boring to do the same thing day after day. This is the problem have with being fit, it's tedious and it's "hard."
People want a quick fix to everything. They want it in politics, they want it in their lives. QUICK FIXES ARE THE BANE OF EVERYTHING. In the long run, a quick fix normally costs you a lot, be it money or your health. People want everything done quickly. THey want their diets to be immediate and stay off indefinitely. When they get off the diet, all that weight just comes straight back. Oops. If people want to diet, they have to stick to that diet forever in order to main the weight or whatever. And if they don't, flop, that weight just bulges right out. Not to mention that in the very long run, people end up with things like cancer, bad colons, and heart disease. This could be easily cured by being active and eating somewhat healthy in the early lifetime. But people want to eat things that taste good and do things that don't seem hard.
These crazy gadgets like remote controlled microwaves and clap on refrigerators are nice, but they do retract from people knoing how to do things. These little things do add up. A long time ago, humans had to hunt for their food. Nowadays, people just have to hunt for the nearest fast food place. If people are too lazy to do something simple, imagine how lazy they are to do something like walk from class to class. Online, anyone?